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Upstairs, Downstairs On the High Seas

FOR crew members of superyachts there are some basic rules -- no hooking up with the guests, for example, and no drinking the boss's liquor without permission. But as any old salt will tell you, a couple of precepts trump all others: no matter how much you're enjoying yourself and no matter how exhilarating the exotic ports of call, never let it show.

And never, ever let the owners think you're having as much fun as they are.

Occasionally, though, something blows a crew's cover. A few weeks back, two crew members in their 20's from Barry Diller's 120-foot yacht, Arriva, were returning after an evening of partying in Sag Harbor, N.Y., when they ran their tender onto a rocky breakwater. One of the yachties was thrown over the breakwater into the sea, and the other ended up splayed on the rocks. Both were hurt -- one punctured a lung -- and one was charged with boating while intoxicated. To experienced hands in the marina, it was a classic mistake.

''If you're in it for a long time, you stay out of the bars,'' said William Coldwell, 56, the captain of the 105-foot motor yacht William I, based in Sag Harbor, who has bailed crew members out of jails in Spain, North Africa and Greece. ''Eventually,'' said Mr. Coldwell, who is known as Chappy, ''it'll get you.''

For landlubbers -- and perhaps for yacht owners like Mr. Diller -- the incident lifted the veil, if briefly, on the curious world of those who live below deck. There are some 25,000 professional yacht crew members worldwide, according to Greg Mullen, the publisher of Dockwalk, a magazine about crew life, and typically they spend the winter in the Caribbean and the summer in Northeastern ports like Sag Harbor, Newport, Nantucket and Bar Harbor, Me., or in the Mediterranean. Their movements are controlled not by wind or currents but by the whims of their gazillionaire bosses.

Wherever they are, yacht crews live in a peculiar limbo. They often spend time elbow to elbow with gorgeous and glamorous guests and have unsupervised access to the trappings and toys of the superrich -- helicopters, Jet Skis and cases of Château Pétrus. ''We live the millionaire's lifestyle without being millionaires,'' said Ian Craddock, a Newport-based captain who spent nine years working aboard the yacht of Nelson Doubleday, the former New York Mets co-owner. ''We have access to boats and airplanes and limousines, and they're not ours. It's a real perk.''

But despite their proximity to wealth and glamour, yachties are not usually rich themselves, and as anyone who has ever been awakened from a cramped bunk in the middle of the night to fix an overflowing head will tell you, the life is not exactly glamorous. Yachties rarely stay in one place long enough to call it home. Having a family is next to impossible. And hovering over every enjoyable moment in a yachtie's life is a sense of dread: at any second, the owner could arrive.

''You're in the most beautiful places, and you're dealing with millionaires and kings and luminaries,'' said Norma Trease, who ran a crew placement agency in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., for 25 years and writes frequently about superyacht crews. ''But the reality is, you're a glorified servant. There's a lot of stress and anxiety between an owner and a crew. It can be intense. The No. 1 goal of every yacht crew is to never say no to an owner.''

Superyacht owners, of course, are far from easy to please. They have spent millions for their yachts -- Greg Norman's new 228-foot boat Aussie Rules, for example, cost about $45 million, and yachts over 120 feet easily cost more than $100,000 a week just to charter -- and have high expectations, sometimes with harrowing consequences.

Michael Eudenbach, 33, a yachtie and a nautical photographer from Newport, once helped deliver the Netscape co-founder James H. Clark's 155-foot sailing yacht Hyperion from San Francisco to Tahiti. The passage was slowed by tropical storms in the Pacific, Mr. Eudenbach said, but Mr. Clark, fearing his yacht might not get to Tahiti in time for his vacation, demanded from California that his crew forge on.

''We ended up dodging and weaving through three storms,'' Mr. Eudenbach said. ''It was the first time I felt really uncomfortable at sea.'' Noting that Mr. Clark's yacht cost $30 million and carried millions in artwork, he added, ''I thought if I go down, I'm grabbing a Picasso.''

Sometimes it's not the rich guy on board who causes the trouble, but the rich guy next door. Mr. Eudenbach said that one night in St. Barts aboard the classic yacht Endeavor, owned by L. Dennis Kozlowski, the former Tyco chairman, he was sent to keep watch with a hose because revelers on a yacht chartered by Sean Combs were tossing burning cigar butts onto Endeavor's wooden decks.

Relations between owners and crews, perhaps always difficult, are growing more complex. Under the traditional European model, strict boundaries separated them. The crew entered at the forward hatch and the owners, who spoke only with the captain, entered aft. Yachts had parapets around the sides, so crews could walk the length of the boat without disturbing the owners inside.

In the last decade, though, the number of superyachts -- boats over 80 feet -- has doubled, to around 8,000, according to Mr. Mullen, many of them built by younger Americans who made quick fortunes in technology. The boats have wider cabins with no balconies, and the crews -- who are increasingly educated to handle the high-tech systems on board -- are in closer contact with the owners, many of whom share their backgrounds. With boundaries blurred, crews of American-owned yachts often don't know where they stand.

''The Europeans don't know your name,'' said Betsy Millson, a former yachtie. ''You're just there to serve them. Americans want to be your friend, they want to know where you went to college and they want to buy you drinks. Then they want you to work 18 hours a day and tend to their six kids.''

Another result of blurred social boundaries: more romance between crews and owners. The phenomenon has even inspired a phrase -- ''Move my things to the master'' -- to describe stewardesses who move up from the crew quarters to the owner's master suite and order former colleagues to fetch their belongings.

Yacht crews work grueling schedules. They wake early to prepare breakfast and ready the yacht for either a day at sea or one of resort-style leisure. Colin Kearney, now the captain of a 64-foot sailboat in Newport, said his duties as watersports coordinator on a 325-foot yacht in the Mediterranean included tending to 15 motorcycles, 10 jet watercraft, 2 cars and a fleet of Windsurfers, kayaks and small sailboats. He got up at 6 and worked until late evening.

Sleeping can be made harder by the partying of guests, especially those who insist on being tended into the wee hours. While guests sleep off their hangovers, the crew is up at dawn. ''Sometimes you're lucky if you get to bed,'' Mr. Kearney said.

On the Northeast circuit, owners usually leave their yachts on Sunday night and return on Thursday. Crews tend to let off steam on Monday nights in dank seaside taverns like Murph's in Sag Harbor and the I.Y.A.C. in Newport, mingling with and pursuing the locals. But getting lucky on shore poses another problem: finding a place to go. One yachtie in Newport last week said that if he wrote a memoir, he would call it ''Nowhere to Snog.''

Modern yachties are compensated for their troubles. Crew quarters on American yachts are bigger than on European vessels, and more extravagant. Captains typically make $1,000 a foot a year. As one of 18 deckhands aboard Limitless, the 315-foot yacht of Leslie Wexner, the founder of the Limited, 23-year-old Aaron Kelly had a stateroom complete with entertainment center; he made $26,000 a year, with benefits.

Patrick E. Malloy, a commodities trader who owns the 195-foot yacht Intuition, based in Sag Harbor (he owns the marina, too), said that keeping a good crew is the secret to enjoying a superyacht. ''If you don't have a good captain and a good crew, it's a nightmare,'' he said.

Certain boats, though, are well known for churning through crews. One such vessel from Maryland has routinely lost crew members thanks to an owner who screams and who has a wife known as a ''microbiology fetishist'' for her obsession about germs on countertops.

Yachties say that when looking at crew job postings, they can easily spot difficult yachts because the owners have to pay markedly higher rates for crew members.

On some yachts, relations between fellow crew members can be as fraught as those between crew and owner. They live in tight quarters and under stress, and tensions occasionally boil over.

''You might hate some of those people, but you're always within 120 feet of them,'' said Aimée Lord, a former yacht stewardess from Newport. She once saw an engineer and a mate in a fistfight on deck. Ms. Trease, the crew expert, said a yacht chef was fired recently for pulling a knife on a fellow crew member.

When it all gets too much, yachties ''go on land,'' a change as momentous as marrying or having children. (Land to yachties is a faraway place, like the moon.) After five years on yachts -- which she calls ''boat jail'' -- Ms. Lord had saved $400,000 with her husband, and was happy to settle on dry ground. She said she had worked for an arms smuggler, a Saudi prince with a fondness for Western women, an executive who was sent to jail for fraud and a Manhattan physician who got drunk and vomited all over his stateroom.

But what really got her, she said, was the boredom. ''All the talk is of boats,'' she said. ''Imagine if you were an accountant and all your friends were accountants, and when you got together all you talked about was accounting.''

As for the owners, Ms. Lord said she found one thing particularly curious: ''I assumed if someone spent a few million bucks on a yacht, they knew something about boats. That was not the case. You won't encounter many nautical types.''

And she had this advice for anyone considering a career on a big boat: ''Don't take the treatment that you might receive personally. It's a service industry, and you have to be prepared to serve.''